Chapter 1
1.
Pale yellow light. Tension spreading across my sternum, up through my chest, landing at the back of my throat, my chin. Izzy’s guest room, the windows dripping in yolky sunlight. A current of dread rushes through me. Outside, the day is blue and beckoning. So beautiful I could scream.
My phone is dead. When I emerge into the kitchen, Izzy is at the island alone, drinking coffee and eating a scone. She stands up a bit, looking up from her food, and dusts off her palms on her kimono. Coconut, salt water. Her long arms around me in a warm hug. Silk and weed and whole wheat flour.
—Coffee? she asks.
—Please.
The trickle of liquid into ceramic.
—I’m so glad you’re all right, she says, touching the ends of my hair between her fingertips.
—I’m okay. Thanks for letting me stay here. I just didn’t really want to go back home.
Steam escapes from the mouth of the coffee cup.
—Your friend, she says, nodding, chewing a bit.
—Julien, I say.
—Very sweet of him to come get you. I’m so sorry my phone was off. But that one must be very sweet to bring you all the way out here.
She wasn’t here when I got in, but I had a key, and I texted her that Julien had dropped me off and I was going to crash in her spare room. When I search her face for more meaning, for any insinuation, I don’t find it.
—Where’s Clem? I ask.
—Ah, she had an early showing this morning for a property in town. Always getting a jump on the day. Much, much earlier than me.
—Anyone fun? I ask.
—She never tells me, Izzy says. All those NDAs.
—Why didn’t you ever tell me about her? I ask. I mean, before this year.
The coffeepot hisses on the counter behind Izzy. She bridges her hands and cracks her knuckles.
—Oh, I guess I was waiting. Until when, I’m not totally sure. She pauses, then sighs. I should have, though, she says.
—I like her.
—Me too, she says, pressing her palm down on mine.
All morning, I think of Lou Reed.
How little attention Sloane pays him when she gets busy, as she’s been these past few months. How much the fur of one animal can look like another. How hurting a dog in any way makes me feel capable of unspeakable evils. How killing a dog seems almost unimaginable. I think of how it could have happened to Lou Reed, running across the street on a cold day, a rainy day, a warm day, looking for some stupid crumb, some tiny speck of food in the grass or in the street, and colliding with a hulk of metal and rubber, his little doggy neck snapped—never able to eat ground turkey and Maldon again.
I try to imagine a world in which he will outlive me.
Mostly, I think, it’s been nice to love him, even as poorly as we do. To have this small constant in my days.
I’m oblivious to so much: Izzy with a girlfriend, a personal life I’ve never been aware of. Other, smaller things: The restaurants off Nolensville that we never go to because we’re lazy or uninterested or some naive combination of both. The openers at The Venue that go on while I’m still at the door, playing to a few dozen people, spilling their guts on the stage. A text from Jessika, trying to be friends. A look from Julien, an asinine comment from Eddie. A brush of Colt’s hand across the bar. The demolition crews dotted across town, tearing down restaurants and historic homes and old studios. The gay bars over on Church Street, the drag brunches I never quite manage to get to. The messages from Sloane, from my parents. The songs I say are too boring or too formulaic or maybe both. Shows, open mics, late nights on the East Side. Julien, trying to tell me something from his stool at the door. I’m really only ever paying attention to myself. To the headliner. Except I’m the worst kind: self-absorbed and sloppy, bombing the show, again.
In the middle of my third night at Izzy’s, just when I’ve barely drifted off, the room a quiet cocoon around me, my phone buzzes softly against the oak nightstand. I pick it up before I see who’s calling.
—There she is.
And just like that, Nick is in the room, beside me, his hair falling across the high-thread-count pillowcase. His voice higher than I remember. Always already a memory.
—Hello?
—Are you asleep? What time is it there? I didn’t think you ever went to sleep.
I sit up, my heartbeat pressing into my abdomen, a faint pulse behind my belly button.
—Where are you? I ask.
—Just finished loading out. Waiting on Timmy to give up on some girl at the bar.
—No, what city? I ask.
—Brooklyn, he says. Just played a loft show with a few guys from Rough Trade. With Jesse? I think you met him once.
—I don’t remember, I say, yawning. How was it?
—I thought I told you about it.
—Maybe that was the other Allison.
—Oh, come on.
The heat rushing through me is a surprise, and I sit up even more, my knuckles and kneecaps cracking as my body sets itself to higher alert.
—Me, come on? Please. You always do this, I say.
—Do what?
—Once there’s a few months of quiet, once there’s enough space between us, enough distance, enough whatever, you call me up or show up in town and fucking kiss me or send me a fucking demo and I just—
—You love when I send you music.
—I love—
—You love…?
We breathe quietly on the line. I imagine where he is: the dark rows of Brooklyn brownstones fading into the night, hipsters walking out of dive bars and ducking into cabs, the small cluster of die-hard fans standing on the sidewalk down the way, T-shirts and records and screen-print posters tucked beneath their arms.
—Jesus, Al. Can’t I just call?
—But you don’t. You didn’t back in Michigan, you haven’t for the last year, since I’ve been here—
—I mean come on. I have a—
Life. He was going to say he had a life, as if I didn’t factor into the one he was living at all.
Izzy’s house is quiet. Somewhere from the woods, bullfrogs croak into the night.
—I can’t anymore, I say. I just can’t.
The line is dead quiet, like he’s standing in a soundproof room instead of on some street corner in Dumbo, staring up at the bridge and the shimmering tip of lower Manhattan. Izzy’s guest room is pitch-black, a cavern.
—Fine, he says. I won’t call anymore.
But he acquiesces too quickly. I want to say, No, I didn’t mean it, you can still call, I changed my mind. I want to ask if the new album is doing well, what they’re going to play on SNL, why I had to find out about it from a pop-up ad on a streaming service.
—You don’t want me, I say. You just don’t want anyone else to have me.
He doesn’t say anything. For a moment I want to wait him out, like if I just give him more time, I’ll hear whatever it is I want to hear. But it doesn’t work that way, I know this now: sitting and waiting rarely gets you any closer to what you want.
—I gotta go, Nick.
Like I have anywhere else to be.
He clicks off the line before either of us says goodbye.
A melody: cascading down some back wavelength of my brain, like the snow of an avalanche, picking up speed. The image of Nick on a street corner, me and Julien on the back balcony of The Venue. I know the window. The bursts like this are short, and I reach for Izzy’s Martin in the corner, trying to capture it, grabbing at the edges of the song to shape it into something. Like trying to hold water in my hands.
You can say I don’t know what I want
that you could be anyone
But baby you’re not anyone
It happens like a crack in the neck of a guitar. Small bits splintering, for months and months, and then one day you pick up the instrument and play a chord and the wood cracks open, exploding in one last dying rush of sound.
Three a.m. (I must be lonely) and the song is finished, whole. I have to rush to catch up with it, my pen scurrying across the back of a bakery receipt as I try to get down the chords, the words, whatever bare bones of rhythm there are. But then, there it is, two hours after Nick’s called, a practically tangible thing. Three minutes and twenty seconds, a rough recording on my phone. A whole song.
Songs I start to listen to again only after I’ve written one of my own:
“Blindsided” (Bon Iver)
“America” (Simon and Garfunkel)
“Skeleton Key” (Margot a one-word answer—a city, a state, a street name—would have sufficed.
—Where in Michigan? he asked.
—I went to school in Ann Arbor, I said.
—That’s right, he said. The Blind Pig.
My chest warmed.
—Yeah, I worked there.
—I saw.
—Right, sure. My illustrious résumé.
He laughed and the edges of the room quieted and softened, like the corners of paper wrapping around a gift.
—What about you? I asked.
—Minnesota.
I couldn’t think of a single venue in the state of Minnesota, so I just said:
—Prince.
Julien laughed quietly again.
—Yeah. Prince.
His eyes were squinty and sleepy now.
—Minneapolis? I asked.
—The suburbs.
—Same.
—But this is home now, Julien said.
And I couldn’t tell if he meant Nashville or the South or maybe Tennessee in general. Or maybe—and I didn’t realize this until later—he was just talking about The Venue. And then there was a rest in the conversation, our eyes locked on each other’s, trying to sort through some unspoken, imagined familiarity. A kind of conspiratorial energy buzzing between us already—as if we’d known each other for a very long time. And then our sound guy started ringing out the system in the main space and the spell was broken and there we were—just having met.